The cellar team finished the last run of bottling for the season last Wednesday. We set a record for Tassel Ridge Winery by bottling almost 16,000 cases for the year. Our next bottling run will be in late October when we bottle the 2015 Iowa Nouveau.
So, we shifted focus and started moving crush pad equipment from our warehouse to the Winery. This includes the fruit elevator, destemmer-crusher, must pump pre-feed, and the must pump. We will do our preventative maintenance on this equipment while we take the final steps in cleaning all of the cellar’s floors and drains.
We’ve also taken samples of our grapes up to Iowa State University to have the Wine Lab check the yeast assimilable nitrogen (YAN) levels. By knowing the YAN levels in each grape variety, we will know how much and which nutrients we need to make available during the fermentation.
